The story
In the 1950s, when Egon Schiele's gaunt, twisted nudes were still treated as an embarrassment and sold for little, a young Viennese eye doctor named Rudolf Leopold began buying them. Over five decades he and his wife Elisabeth assembled the largest collection of Schiele anywhere, and in 1994 they sold the bulk of it, more than 5,000 works, to a foundation set up by the Austrian state and national bank, on the condition it become a museum.
That museum opened in 2001 as a white limestone cube in the MuseumsQuartier, the former imperial stables turned culture complex in central Vienna. Its core is Schiele: nearly 300 works, among them the raw self-portraits and the emaciated figures that made his reputation before he died at 28 in the 1918 flu pandemic. Around him hangs the wider world of Vienna around 1900, including Gustav Klimt's Death and Life, in which a robed skeleton watches a tangle of sleeping bodies.
The collection also carries the century's unfinished business. Schiele's Portrait of Wally was seized while on loan in New York in 1998 over a Nazi-era ownership claim, and the case dragged on until a 2010 settlement returned the painting to the Leopold in exchange for a payment to the original owner's heirs.
